Sunday, February 06, 2011

We progress

A young girl at the next desk asked for some help with logging on. She gave me a withering look when I said it was important not to press Return at one point.

I use this key, she said, pointing to one that I do not think I have ever noticed before, & certainly never used.

I felt like saying Hoity-toity, miss! I was using computers before you were even born.

Then it struck me – it’s time to start planning my golden jubilee party to mark the 50th anniversary of that first computer course – a one week summer school at Imperial College to be inducted into the mysteries of FORTRAN. Back at college after the start of term we were allowed two goes at writing a program to calculate the mean & standards deviation of a set of twenty numbers.

Both my attempts failed.